The Dreaming Vol3: I’ve finished pencilling chapter 16 (2 our of 6) of vol3, and has started inking chapter 15. This is going to the be last volume of “The Dreaming”, so I’m beginning to work out the details of my next work. But first, I gotta post up a Chapter 8 preview of “The Dreaming” vol2 first, which is coming out in November.
Supanova 2006: I’ll be there, selling copies of “The Dreaming” vol1, for about AUD$12. I’ll be at booth Y of the artist’s alley, and TOKYOPOP Australia has also printed a series of bookmarks for “The Dreaming” to be given away for free! Keep your eyes peeled. I’ll be sharing a table with Poshua, who’s selling a copy of “Generation 2006” ($12), an Australian manga anthology. This anthology contains my manga “The Two Dollar Deal” in it, so that’s probably your sole chance to buy it in print (for now).
Project “One2Eight” (aka 1 TWO 8): This is a new project I’ve created, and I’ve yet to put up a proper information page for it. The project consists of a series of short stories, each self-contained and complete, with a strict limit on the number of pages allowed. The challenge is to tell 8 stories, consisting of a 1-page story, a 2-page story, a 3-page story, and so on, to an 8-page story.
Both “The Two Dollar Deal” (8-pages) and “Message To You” (4-pages) is part of this series, and now you get to see “Only Flora” (5-pages), which is actually a prequel to another story (part of the “Boy Meets Girl in 10 Pages or Less” series). I did this story a fair while ago, and it was basically just an excuse to experiment at drawing without using ANY rulers (save for the panel lines). What the heck.
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The inspiration for this project came from a quote of Hagio Moto, who said that if you can tell a single, complete story in 8-pages then, you’ll never have any trouble telling a story of ANY length. Hagio Moto is right on that, but I want to go a step further, to see whether you can a single, complete story with a story arc in less than 8-pages (what a “story arc” will need a better definition). And I’ve proven that it’s doable. You can tell a 1-page story, but you can’t have a narrative arc in only 1-page of manga. Another aim of this project is to find the watershed point at which a story can begin to have a story arc, which is to say that it actually has a beginning, a middle and an end.
Narrative Watershed: I’ve found this point to be at 4-pages. 4-pages is the least number of pages you can have in telling a single, self-contained story with a story arc. It was originally 5-pages, with “Only Flora”, but I decided “Message To You” could qualify. At first it didn’t because it had no text in it, but I changed my mind when I realised you can tell a far longer story without text (Gon, anybody?). So why wouldn’t it qualify?